Sounds pretty cool, right? Unfortunately, it has the side effect of modifying the all-too-familiar download and installation experience from Next -> Next -> Next -> Finish into something that looks like this:

You’ll find plenty of diagrams and literature on the NOS site about their technology, how easy it is to customize and how it increases customer satisifaction through ease of use and simplicity (this, I strongly doubt). What you won’t find is screenshots.

Countless companies employ “Download Managers”, as though the Save File functionality in Internet Explorer or Firefox is insufficient for the task at hand. Typically these serve as advertising shells or simply an excuse to get more software on your machine. They all miss the mark; additional software downloaded and installed under the assumption a download will be interrupted or some marginal increase in download and installation time will make up for the additional complexity.

If Adobe has indeed continued to utilize getPlus, they’ve done a terrific job of hiding the complexity so that we reap the rewards without paying the price.

Not only that, I want the search engine crawlers to record it as a permanent redirect (HTTP 301) and stop perpetuating these old URLs.

RewriteRule photos(.*) /galleries$1 [R=301,L]

The tricky bits are the $1 and [flags]. The $1 refers back to the Pattern, photos(.*), and basically writes a new URL that starts with /galleries and appends everything that matches after the word photos.

The [flags] tell the browser this was an HTTP 301 Permanent Redirect, and that for the preceding conditions, this should be the Last rule (i.e. stop processing).